Mayor Still Opposing Law On Perils of Lead Paint

By WINNIE HU

Published: February 7, 2004

Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg continued yesterday to oppose a tough new law on lead-paint hazards, which the City Council passed this week over his veto, saying that he hoped it would be thrown out in the courts.

''This is not the kind of bill we should have,'' Mayor Bloomberg said. ''Now there's a good chance the courts will throw it out because they threw out the last one based on not having an environmental impact statement. This one will probably be thrown out, I hope, for the same reason.''

But Mayor Bloomberg, who was speaking on his weekly radio show on WABC-AM, declined yesterday to say whether the city would file a legal challenge to block the lead law from taking effect within the next six months. Instead, he said the city was prepared to enforce the law because ''that's democracy -- you have to do it whether you agree with it or not.''

The new law regulates the removal of lead-paint hazards, including dust, from apartments built before 1960. It also requires landlords to identify all children younger than 7 living inside those units every year.

While council leaders say the law will help protect children from lead poisoning, Bloomberg administration officials, landlords and advocates for low-income housing say it will be extremely costly, duplicate programs already in place and discourage affordable housing projects by making it more difficult to secure liability insurance.

Several of these opponents said yesterday that they were considering suing over the law.

Councilman Bill Perkins, the main sponsor of the law, said the council had spent months studying the environmental impacts of the new law. In contrast, he said, the environmental review for the previous law on lead paint received all of ''40 seconds.''

In July, the State Court of Appeals struck down the city's four-year-old law to clean up lead paint, saying the Council failed to identify and explain the potential effects on the environment and public health.

Mayor Bloomberg said yesterday that the new lead law was an effort to ''pander to a handful of activists who will never be satisfied,'' and called for a more practical solution to protecting children from lead poisoning.

Indeed, the mayor said that he would like nothing better than to rid the city of lead poisoning, a scourge that he asserted had brought down earlier civilizations.

''If you go back and look at Roman bones, an awful lot of the people had lead poisoning and malaria,'' he said. ''Those were the two things that really, maybe, in the end brought down the Roman Empire.''